Not going to lie, but something about DOS software always looked appealing to me. Especially the blue backgrounds. Maybe because it always reminds me of the computer that was used at the VHS rental place back in the day.
Even now DOS word processors have an ability to draw me in, but maybe it's all just because I've never been keep on large screens and the 80x25 resolution scales down well.
I tried it out an old laptop for a little while. There's a decent selection of software, at least enough to make it useful for very basic office work. OpenGEM works well as a very bare bones GUI. Networking is a hundred and one kinds of fucked, so don't even mess with it if you're going for the "it just werkz" approach. The install was easy and installing additional software isn't hard, just do your homework on it beforehand.
But at the end of the day I still despise DOS. It's an operating system so disgusting and so repulsive that even Microsoft depreciated it as soon as they could. Unix isn't perfect but at least it isn't DOS.
Unix is worse than DOS though. DOS ran well on a 4.77 MHz machine with 640k memory and two floppy drives.
That'd be fine, but DOS becomes a mess when you legitimately need more ram than that- whether it's games or productivity software. Luckily the newer stuff often does its own memory management, so you're not completely doomed to mess with system config files.
I would just let QEMM optimize memory, and then make a boot menu in autoexec.bat for different profiles. Don't think I ever needed to make a boot floppy for HD-installed games, even though some manuals mention that as a way to free up memory.
you can run microsoft space simulator: en.wikipedia.org
and demos and you can do just about anything you want on it and nothing gets in the way except your imagination and hardware. also having a soundblaster makes freedos a lot more fun/useful
That mess was fixed with the introduction of DPMI. Earlier programs using EMS or XMS (or, heaven forbid, manual protected-mode shenanigans) were indeed a mess.
No, the newer stuff comes with a DPMI server like DOS/4GW or CWSDPMI that does its memory management when ran on bare DOS.
I'll admit that I haven't really used DOS extensively, so I don't know many of the specifics other than the 640k limit and EMS/XMS- but a few DOS applications I own that use DOS/4GW still have the need for a certain amount of free RAM under 640k. So it evidently wasn't completely solved- or at least I'm assuming so, because I don't imagine the option to create a boot disk would be necessary otherwise.
I suppose I'll be better able to mess with that once I get a motherboard and case for those 486 parts.
Shit is broken, even the installer doesn't work properly.
Utter garbage
Are you using the legacy or standard CD image? It could help if you're installing it on an extremely old machine.